The Designer / Anthropologist's Diary

How can Design helps to define what it means to be human and how can anthropology empower the values expressed in design? These are two main questions that designer anthropologists aim to provide an answer. Here in this blog I will share my suggestions, reflections and ideas about how one discipline can embrace the other with the purpose to make better and meaningful design.

[designanthro]

Computational Anthropology Reveals How the Most Important People in History Vary by Culture | MIT Technology Review

Anthropology has several uses and today, more than ever, according to new landscapes of research and new perception of research frameworks it reveal itself as a powerful way to study and analyze the world… super fascinating

[designanthro]

Does anyone knows the importance of Xerox PARC for the evolution of Design Anthropology as a discipline?

Well this research laboratory established in Palo Alto California in 1970 represent one of the early examples of the multidisciplinary approaches that many [C]orporations involved in their internal dynamics. Without this experience nothing would probably never happened. 

[designanthro]

How did Design Anthropology developed over decades so far?

Here I present one of the several factors that brought to the rise of Design Anthropology as we know it today. One of those factor definitely has its roots in the european "design in context" activities as well as the early application of the anthropological practice inside the industrial organizational context.

[designanthro]

Changing Organizations from the inside

This work has been written as final paper for the course in History & Theory of Design Anthropology at Swinburne University in Melbourne and aim to support Participatory Design activities in the corporate context. Click on the title above to see the content on Issuu.com

[designanthro]

Corporations today ask for anthropologist's knowledge in order to provide effective changes inside the corporate context, both from an organizational as well as social perspective.

Here I present the final work prepared for the course of History and Theory of Design Anthropology that I conceived in order to apply principles and the cultural background inside the organization where I used to work in. These principles supported me in my research trying to identify values and cultural principles inside my corporate context.

In particular in this video I present a participatory design game that I conceived with the aim to understand employees thoughts and opinions about the office space where they live every day. 

[designanthro]

Contemporary European Design Anthropology

While the US way to apply Design Anthropology may be seen as a collection of methods with the aim to gain more insights about customer's behavior in the name of profit in order to answer internal questions like: how do we sell more? 

The european way to approach the discipline is perceivable with a wider and even spreader scope; maybe because lead by its sociological roots in anthropology that aim to provide answers to questions more directed to human necessities and desires like: 

"How do we interpret people's needs?"

or maybe, because of its connections between universities and governments which lead to focus more on possible landscapes for research and new applications for Design Anthropology and how the discipline can contribute to make social innovation. Furthermore it seems clear that the challenge is to release Anthropology from its conventional methodological focus on people out of time and instead better equip anthropologists to deal with the contemporary, understood as an open moment in which the world is potentially changing (Halse in Gunn, Otto & Smith, 2013); this change is sustained by different people driven methods that aim to involve real humans in creative ideation processes, and visualization and modeling of service prototypes (Bason, 2013), these are sensemaking practices that aim to understand how people experience life (Madsbjerg & Rasmussen, 2014).

The result of such effort is represented by big amounts of qualitative data that will become source of inspirations for new concepts in the design process or crytical feedback in testing stages, so people are always involved in this co participant design process. Considering that It may be possible to predict a customer's next mouse click or purchase, but no amount of quantitative data can tell you why she made that click or purchase (Madsbjerg & Rasmussen, 2014), unless you call a designer anthropologist.

Such scenario described through the comparison of the US and the european perspectives about the discipline suggest me that the designer/anthropologist has the knowledge and the ability to understand whom is talking with and in that sense he is able to produce understandable communication and suitable data according to the kind of context where he found himself to operate. Being able to understand means see what is the context and its historical/cultural background in order to produce the fittest communication beneath a certain framework that could be defined inside in the academic/public as well as in the corporate context.

References:

MADSBJERG, C., & RASMUSSEN, M. B. (2014). An Anthropologist Walks Into a Bar. Harvard Business Review, 92(3), 80-88.

HALSE, J. (2013). Ethnographies of the Possible. In W. Gunn, T. Otto & R. Smith (Eds.), Design Anthropology: Between Theory and Practice (pp. 180-196). London: Berg Publishing.

BASON, C. (2013). Design-Led Innovation in Government.Stanford Social Innovation Review, 11(2), 15-17.

[designanthro]

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Virginia Woolf

[designanthro]

In this TED talk, Seth Godin reminds us that, no matter how modern we consider ourselves since we still follow the same basic guidelines that characterize social human behaviors; "tribes" are part of our being "social animals" and it is according to this idea that we should conceive design for communities of people in many contexts, from the one of the office to friends and so on… anthropology has a lot to give in that sense. 

[designanthro]

Contemporary US Design Anthropology

People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it..

I decided to start this post with a quote from a TED talk by Simon Sinek that suddenly reminded me a different approach that lead corporations to find alternative ways to conceive, make, test and promote their products answering the major question*: 

How can we fidelize our customers and make new ones?

In his talk he argue that contemporary leader corporations lead because of a different way to think about communication and in a similar way it suggested me when the work of the anthropologist was to reframe the sponsors understanding from one of rationality to that of trust (Cefkin, 2012).

In her experience in Microsoft, Anne Kirah tells how anthropological work helped the company to change from techno-driven to people-driven design (Experientia, 2006) this experience suggest that the main interest of US corporations aim to establish new ways to make human interactions inside and outside the office. Another case is relatively to the re-branding process that allows marketers to extend their relationships with consumers on multiple levels, mediating between individuals and corporations in reflexive exchanges of consumption and production (Malefyt, 2009).

Corporations also discovered ethnography as the means to assume a closer representantion of the consumer "other" (Malefyt, 2009) and under the control of the anthropologist they moved searching for patterns across life stages, within life stages, across cultures, and within cultures (Experientia, 2006) making design recommendations based on the themes that emerged from the research.

The anthropological discipline is present and past focused to develop a body of knowledge, design is future focused and the goal is to develop new products, services, and policies (Wasson & Metcalf in Gunn, Otto & Smith, 2013) so the hybrid discipline result as the fittest in order to probe and predict future tendencies as evidence* for the corporate objectives.

The US case described a scenario where Design Anthropology has been used in order to recapture the human presence in the corporation world where paradoxically humans have often left apart for profit sake.

References:

WASSON, C., & METCALF, C. (2013). Bridging Disciplines and Sectors: An Industry-Academic Partnership in Design Anthropology. In W. Gunn, T. Otto & R. Smith (Eds.), Design Anthropology: Between Theory and Practice (pp. 216-231). London: Berg Publishing.

CEFKIN, M. (2012). Close Encounters: Anthropologists in the Corporate Arena.Journal of Business Anthropology, 1(1), 91-117.http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/jba/article/view/3548

EXPERIENTIA. (2006). Experientia interviews Anne Kirah, senior design anthropologist at Microsoft. Retrieved from: http://www.experientia.com/blog/experientia-interviews-anne-kirah/

SINEK, S. (2009). Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action. Retrieved from: TED.com

MALEFYT, T. (2009). Understanding the Rise of Consumer Ethnography: Branding Technomethodologies in the New Economy, American Anthropologist, 111, 2, p. 201-210, MasterFILE Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 11 August 2013.

[designanthro]

While I was studying at Swinburne I was also working part time as event and communication manager for the local fablab. Here over the simple interest in the artifact production I was interested in understanding how the context of the fablab in itself would affect people's ability to make and conceive design.

I assumed that the context positively impact on people's ability to nurture the design process but this was hard to quantify so I designed a simple "Self Documentation Kit" that fablab users would bring with their own in order to annotate their experience inside the laboratory. 

The result provided some good data about how people experience their day inside the laboratory and according to such results I designed a new website interface that would facilitate the daily routine with the fablab online website.

[designanthro]

A place to share an interest for anthropological quest

Hi! Welcome to my blog! My name is Fabrizio, I am an italian industrial designer and almost a year ago (after my graduation at the Polytechnic of Turin) I applied to Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne as an online student.

Since the beginning of my academic path I thought to develop my design skills in order to become an interior designer; but it is during the three years as a student in Turin that I realized that the interior design profession wouldn't fit for me since I was searching for a kind of design that permeate meaning over function or mere style.

Through the discipline of Design Anthropology I realized that [R]esearch and a theoretical background could provide the necessary knowledge to discover values and meaning that matter to people.

A process of design that express people's values is what the contemporary society need in order to develop a culture that emphasize and respect other cultures for what they are. Respect for differences is the goal since it is in the space of difference that we discover our real values and what really matter.

hope you will enjoy fabrizio 

[designanthro]

Design Anthropology; It seeks to understand how the processes and artefacts of design help define what it means to be human and how design translates human values into tangible experiences.

Elizabeth Dori Tunstall - Associate Professor of Design Anthropology @ Swinburne University of Technology

[designanthro]

Design Anthropology @ Swinburne

In the beginning I thought that Design Anthropology meant a sort of ethnographically-informed design of new products, services and system for consumers and businesses (Gray, 2010) but today I realized through the Swinburne approach that we can both conceive insightful ideas from the ethnographic research on one side and on the other we can make the difference with a positive impact on people and communities. This objective can be accomplished by a hybrid methodology that combines theoretical studies with practical field-research.

When I realized that I wanted to study Design Anthropology I was at a cross road; In 2013 I have been selected in two universities in England for an Interior Design Ma degree but after a bachelor in Industrial Design here in italy I thought that I wanted to do something more concious and less dictated by fads; at the same time I wanted to work practically on objects and artifacts.

In this sense I was searching for a hybrid way to endow my projects of meaning; in fact I firmly agree with Tunstall that argue that "the form has just as much meaning at the content", a perspective that is pretty far from the idea of Design taught in a Polytechnic as the one in Turin, a post industrial city specialized in car manufacture.

Today, I recognize just one lack that is mainly given by the fact that I am an online student, as such my only contact with the university and peers occurs though a web site, so no human face-to-face contact which is considered necessary in order to establish effective distributed work teams as stated by Gray. Furthermore Design Anthropology aim to constitute holistic and multidisciplinary teams, so for my future I wish to attend the "physical" course at Swinburne in order to fill this gap of human interaction and complete a path started 7 months ago with this insightful formative experience.

References:

TUNSTALL, E. (n.d.). Dori's Journey of Design Anthropology. Week 01 Lecture. Retrieved on 10 August from Swinburne University. https://ilearn.swin.edu.au/bbcswebdav/xid-23198366_2

GRAY, P. (2010). Business Anthropology and the Culture of Product Managers. AIPMM Product Management Library of Knowledge, August 8. Retrieved on 8 August 2014 from http://www.aipmm.com/html/newsletter/archives/000437.php